"This thing you call language though, most remarkable. You depend on it for so very much. But is any one of you really its master?" -- Kollos (speaking via Spock), Star Trek, Season 3, Episode 5.
I'm thinking of extending Marpa with a language called Lua. (I call the project Kollos, after a character from the Star Trek episode "Is there in truth no beauty?".) There are a lot of things I do not like about Lua, starting with the syntax. But as I study and compare, I realize that Lua is the way it is because it is uniquely focused on being a good language for embedding, extending and forking. And that kind of focus is really what I am after. Ideally, once wrapped up in Kollos, Marpa becomes easy for others to mold to their liking. Right now, Marpa::R2's "organically evolved" mix of C library, XS code, and Perl is a barely penetrable tangle. The Kollos project is, I think, a much better way out of this than refactoring. When Kollos is mature enough, an XS interface could be written for it, and perhaps this will be the successor to Marpa::R2. Kollos would also be a way to use Marpa without the overhead of Perl. I think this approach has real potential for allowing people to adapt Marpa to their needs and visions. I usually let an idea get more mature than this before sharing it to the marpa-parser list, but I think this may be a good point to seek feedback. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "marpa parser" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
